Biden Expected to Permanently Ban Some Offshore Drilling
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President Joe Biden is preparing to issue a decree permanently banning new offshore oil and gas development in some U.S. coastal waters, locking in difficult-to-revoke protections for sensitive marine areas during his final weeks in the White House.
Biden is set within days to issue the executive order barring the sale of new drilling rights in portions of the country’s outer continental shelf, according to people familiar with the effort who asked not to be named because the decision isn’t public.
The move is certain to complicate President-elect Donald Trump’s ambitions to drive more domestic energy production. Unlike other executive actions that can be easily undone, Biden’s planned declaration is rooted in a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect U.S. waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly empowering presidents to revoke the designations.
The move responds to pressure from congressional Democrats and environmental groups who have lobbied Biden to “maximize permanent protections” against offshore drilling, arguing the action is essential to safeguard vulnerable coastal communities, protect marine ecosystems from oil spills and fight climate change.
White House and Interior Department officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The move responds to pressure from congressional Democrats and environmental groups who have lobbied Biden to “maximize permanent protections” against offshore drilling. (Shawn Thew/Bloomberg News)
Biden administration officials have been considering the approach for more than two years, though their efforts intensified after Trump’s victory, as the outgoing president sought to enshrine new environmental measures before the end of his term. The fresh offshore protections are in line with similar recent Biden actions to protect areas from industrial mining and energy development, including a formal proposal issued Dec. 30 to thwart the sale of new oil, gas and geothermal leases in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains.
Biden has prioritized conservation while in office and is already on track to protect more U.S. lands and waters than any other president, even as he faces mounting calls to expand that record with new national monuments safeguarding culturally significant land in California.
The full scope of Biden’s coming offshore protections wasn’t clear early Jan. 2, but the protected areas include waters considered critical to coastal resilience and the designation is designed to be targeted, said people familiar with the decision. Although congressional Democrats and scores of environmental groups had urged Biden to make a more sweeping designation, recent deliberations have focused on parts of the Pacific Ocean near California and eastern Gulf of Mexico waters by Florida.
Trump Challenge
Trump is expected to order a reversal of the protections, but it’s not clear he will be successful. During his first term in office, Trump sought to revoke former President Barack Obama’s order to protect more than 125 million acres (50.6 million hectares) of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, which was rejected by a federal district court in 2019.
Trump has actually used the same statute to block oil and gas leasing in waters near Florida and North Carolina in a bid to appeal to voters in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Supporters of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs offshore oil and gas development, note that Congress gave presidents wide discretion to permanently protect waters from leasing, but it didn’t explicitly grant them the authority to undo those designations.
Trump is expected to order a reversal of the protections, but it’s not clear he will be successful. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)
For decades, presidents have invoked the provision to preserve walrus feeding grounds, U.S. Arctic waters and other sensitive marine resources, beginning with former President Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1960 created the Key Largo Coral Reef Preserve that remains protected today. Though presidents have modified decisions from their predecessors to exempt areas from oil leasing, courts have never validated a complete reversal — and until Trump, no president had even attempted one.
Biden has already curtailed new offshore oil and gas development opportunities in the short term with less enduring measures. His administration created a program for selling offshore leases that allows just three auctions over the next five years, a record low. However, Trump is expected to rewrite that leasing plan using an administrative process that could take at least a year, and Republican lawmakers are considering ways to expand offshore oil lease sales as a way to raise revenue to offset the cost of extending tax cuts.
Oil industry advocates have warned against restrictions, arguing the world will need fossil fuels for decades to come — and the U.S. produces them more cleanly than other countries. Nearly a century after it was first drilled, the Gulf of Mexico remains a key source of U.S. oil and gas, providing about 14% of domestic output today — enough that if it were a country, it would rank among the world’s top 12 oil producers.
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